Can you keep your laptop running for a whole day and do the things you normally would doe? And make sure you have a terminal open and have TOP running in the terminal. This terminal command line tool will show which application is responsible for the assumed memory leak.

Changing swappiness will not fix the memory leak, the only thing what will happen when reducing the swappiness is how many times and how much the Linux kernel is swapping memory pages from RAM to the swap file/partition. See here as well: http://linuxtips.simpsite.nl/reduce-swappiness.

Acer TravelMate-5742Z : running MX-17.1 / BIOS date: 18-11-2010

In 2007 my Windows XP based system informed me to update the system. So, i installed Linux

Can you keep your laptop running for a whole day and do the things you normally would doe? And make sure you have a terminal open and have TOP running in the terminal. This terminal command line tool will show which application is responsible for the assumed memory leak.

Changing swappiness will not fix the memory leak, the only thing what will happen when reducing the swappiness is how many times and how much the Linux kernel is swapping memory pages from RAM to the swap file/partition. See here as well: http://linuxtips.simpsite.nl/reduce-swappiness.

However, you mentioned this is your first post;

I will not power down for a day and the next day I have excessive memory swaps to disk. I'm guessing there's a big memory leak somewhere, may be Firefox or something within MX.

To me this indicates that your system memory (RAM) will be filled up by Firefox or any other application, but as you state only by Firefox. But like i said, keep your system up and running with firefox fr a whole day with TOP running in a terminal on the background. Can you make snapshots of it with a camera/mobile phone every couple of hours to monitor the status of TOP?

Acer TravelMate-5742Z : running MX-17.1 / BIOS date: 18-11-2010

In 2007 my Windows XP based system informed me to update the system. So, i installed Linux

My guess its that the swappiness is occuring because when I start MX in a VM, with just Firefox and only 3 tabs open, it is already using 850+ mb of ram so when you suspend to ram that is requiring over your 1.5GB of ram so it is using swap to compensate. In my experience, once you enter swap there is no getting out. I would recommend closing Firefox in the future before suspending to ram.

2)
At the moment Zram has filled up the system RAM your system will be forced to use the swapfile on the hard drive anyways while Zram is still using the system RAM

3)
Most important, Zram is an experimental kernel module. So when usimg Zram, it could crash your system.

are these your assumptions? have you try it?
your assumptions are wrong, pls do test it before putting above nonsense.
zram and zswap reduce hd swapping and improve performance for old/low power cpu/ram, data flows in memory is 10x faster than hd swap.
for best performance, change FACTOR=25 to 50. u can use root thunar and double click on /etc/init.d/zram file to edit.

Last edited by stsoh on Sat Nov 03, 2018 6:39 am, edited 1 time in total.